1650 -1702 · Haarlem and Leeuwarden

Animated cabarets, musicians and everyday humor make Richard Brakenburgh a vivid heir to the Dutch genre scene.

Richard Brakenburgh was born in Haarlem in 1650 and died there in 1702. He probably trained with Hendrik Mommers and looked closely at Adriaen van Ostade, Jan Steen and the tavern painters. Documented in Leeuwarden in the 1670s and 1680s, he married Johanna van der Wielen there before returning to Haarlem, where he joined the guild of Saint-Luc in 1687. Brakenburgh painted portraits, Italianate landscapes and especially genre scenes: inns, parties, families, musicians and companies drinking together. Drinkers and musicians in a cabaret, with children in hoops, brings together several micro-stories in a unique space. Music enlivens the main group, drinks and conversations organize relationships, while the child introduces an unexpected circular movement. The painter does not moralize heavily. He observes the pleasure, disorder and diversity of ages with clear composition, warm color and attention to gestures. Amateur poet, Brakenburgh also belongs to Haarlem's chamber of rhetoric De Witte Angieren; this link between image, theater and speech helps to understand the narrative liveliness of his paintings. An artist prosperous enough to leave an important collection, he disseminated until the beginning of the 18th century a tradition of Dutch sociability where each interior becomes a stage, and each spectator can recognize one familiar behavior. The "Richard Brakenburgh" selection notably compares drinkers and musicians in a cabaret. His reading favors composition.

Brakenburgh orchestrates the cabaret like a little comedy: the music sets the rhythm, the glass restarts the dialogue and the child goes through the adult roles.